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The meaning of making 1: Philosophies of craft

In this chapter, and the next one, we will begin our more detailed study of the idea that ‘making is connecting’, by looking (mostly) at the offline, non-digital world of people making things for themselves and others.

• This is the activity that we might call ‘craft’ – although that phrase is loaded with connotations which will vary between people and between places.

The term ‘craft’ is further complicated by its relationship with ‘art’. Somehow the two concepts have become separated, so that ‘art’ tends to mean the truly creative transformation of ideas and emotions, whilst ‘craft’ – having been shoved out of that space – ends up indicating the less prestigious production of carvings or pots, by less creative people who just like making carvings or pots. This view is, of course, most unfair. As Peter Dormer has observed: The consequences of this split have been quite startling. It has also led to the idea that there exists some sort of mental attribute known as ‘creativity’ that precedes or can be divorced from a knowledge of how to make things. One way to avoid this trap is to reject the positioning of ‘art’ as superior, and instead to regard its stance as unnecessarily pretentious and exclusive.

• There is still, of course, the problem that this may not be the majority or dominant view.

In recent years the status of craft has been helped by Richard Sennett’s excellent book The Craftsman – amongst readers and thinkers, I mean, rather than amongst doers and makers, who may not need such writings to persuade them. Sennett argues vigorously against the second-class status of craft, and is especially good on his core theme that thinking and making are aspects of one unified process. Sennett emphasizes craft as a unity of body and mind; more broadly, in Sennett’s hands, craft becomes a process of making personal self-identity, and citizenship. Sennett treats craft with great seriousness, as Ellen Dissanayake has written: There is an inherent pleasure in making. Of using one’s own agency, dexterity, feelings and judgment to mold, form, touch, hold and craft physical materials. This urgent need to make, for the sake of the pleasure and understanding gained within the process of making itself, is identified by Dormer as one of the reasons why craft has been able to survive, and perhaps become stronger, in spite of its detachment from so-called fine art: the sense of being alive within the process; and the engagement with ideas, learning, and knowledge which come not before or after but within the practice of making.

These engaging ideals are at the heart of all artistic and creative impulses, and make a mockery of the idea that craft is an inferior or second-class kind of activity. Whilst ‘fine art’ is more dependent on hierarchies and elites, upon which it relies to validate the work. Craft is more about creativity and the process of making at a vibrant, grassroots level. In particular, craft seems to be about a drive to make and share things, no matter what anyone says. In a different essay, Peter Dormer writes: Making – craft, skill, and the realization of an object through craft labour – is not a trivial issue for craftspeople. Making is both the means through which the craftsperson explores their obsession or idea and an end in itself.

• In this sense, making and connecting is not an option – it is experienced as a necessity.

It seems vital and contemporary, but woven into a vision of craft – a connection between humans and handmade objects and nature – which is as old as the hills. It began with two Victorian thinkers who hated Victorian times, John Ruskin and William Morris, whose work and ideas occupy the rest of this chapter. The answer lies, as you will see, in their ideas about creativity as a part of everyday life, and as a binding force in ‘fellowship’ – which today we would call community.

• In their own ways, they were saying that ‘making is connecting’, and their works have much to offer today.

Ruskin was born in 1819, making him 15 years older than Morris. Although we typically picture eminent Victorians as craggy prophets with lots of grey hair and beards, Ruskin got going early. At the point when he published the second volume of The Stones of Venice, a book which really impressed William Morris whilst a new undergraduate at Oxford – in 1853 – both were young men (at 34 and 19 respectively). Ruskin was extremely prolific. He is remembered primarily as an artist and art critic, and as a social thinker, but he also produced poetry and fiction, and wrote about architecture, geology, literature, science, and the environment. Ruskin’s opposition to industrialism, and exploitative capitalism, and his care for the common worker, mean that today we would interpret his stance as ‘obviously’ a left-wing, socialist kind of position.

• However, Ruskin is often described as a ‘conservative’, and indeed he begins his autobiographical Praeterita with the declaration, ‘I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school.’

To modern viewers, who tend to place political philosophies– at least as a starting-point – on a left-wing to right-wing spectrum, this can seem confusing. In fact, a Ruskin kind of conservatism, which yearns for the (rather distant and idealized) past because of an attachment to the values of communities, local-level organic production, care for the environment, and valuing all workers rather than treating them as parts in a machine, all sounds quite radical and progressive to modern ears.

• Or it does if you see them as a programme for the future, rather than just the mourning of a lost past.

As Clive Wilmer notes: No political label quite fits Ruskin’s politics. . . . His ‘Toryism’ was such that it could, in his own lifetime, inspire the socialism of William Morris and the founders of the Labour Party; and when he called himself a ‘conservative’, he usually meant as a preserver of the environment – what we should call a ‘conservationist’.

Ruskin’s writing was often complex, and unpredictable – not necessarily in a good way. In one lecture he declared, ‘For myself, I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted myself at least three times.’

One of these is UntoThis Last, a set of four essays published as a book in 1862,in which the author brings together his ideas to form a powerful moral critique of laissez-faire economics – the newly established orthodoxy which maintained that unimpeded individual self-interest should be the driving force of social and economic organization.

This, its proponent said, would enable the greatest amount of economic growth, which would be generally good for society even if an unlucky proportion of the population was condemned to inevitable poverty and/or the most menial, meaningless, and exhausting work.

This ideology infuriated Ruskin, whose moral and romantic instincts would not allow any system where life was abused and exploited for any purpose. But Ruskin was also making a rigorous, rational argument against the claims of the economists to have established a ‘scientific’ approach t the cultivation of wealth. The aim of developing a perfect economic system where material concerns are detached from moral ones, and where individual interests are detached from social context, was intellectually wrong as well as morally empty, he argued.

• This is captured most simply in the assertion, which appears near the end of Unto This Last, and is spelled out in capitals: ‘THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE’.

For Ruskin, financial wealth which does not contribute to the stock of human happiness is no wealth at all. Ruskin was aware that his critics would try to dismiss him as old-fashioned, sentimental, and failing to take a ‘realistic’ approach to modern industrial society.

Unto This Last seemed to Victorian society at the time to be a rather shocking and misguided outburst from one of its most celebrated art critics. Why was he suddenly upsetting the establishment with these radical ideas?

In fact, Ruskin’s social-political views are well grounded in his previous writings on art and architecture, and, interestingly for us, stem from an emphasis on the primacy of human creativity.

Another such burst of Ruskin insight and lucidity had appeared eight years earlier in an essay entitled ‘The Nature of Gothic’. This was the sixth chapter of the second volume of The Stones of Venice, a typically sprawling three-volume discussion of Gothic architecture. This is the Ruskin that caught the attention of the undergraduate William Morris, as mentioned above.

He read chunks of it excitedly to his Oxford friend Edward Burne-Jones in 1853, and, as a lifelong fan of this essay in particular, Morris would republish it as a beautiful book by his own Kelmscott Press in 1892, writing in the preface that ‘in future days [this chapter] will be considered as one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century’.

In ‘The Nature of Gothic’, Ruskin focuses his attention on the defining characteristics of Gothic architecture, the reasons, it turns out, are good ones, and not simply a matter of aesthetic choice. Ruskin admires the ‘savagery’ and ‘rudeness’ of the Gothic style, not for a masculine tough reason, but because he sees it as the loving embrace of humanity’s imperfections.

To force a craftsperson to make things to fixed specifications – ‘with absolute precision by line and rule’ – was to make them a ‘slave’, Ruskin asserted. Ruskin therefore welcomes the collaborative mish-mash, the combined construction of individual quirks and talents, a celebration of imperfection, imagination, and ‘do what you can’.

He sets this fine spirit of noble and creative imperfection against the ignoble desire to see the ‘narrow accomplishment’ of supposedly ‘perfect’ work done to a readymade pattern.

This brings out the moral choice to be made. A human being can be forced to work as a ‘tool’, following the precise instructions of their masters, making things correctly, but they are dehumanized and their spirit is gagged.

This tips Ruskin into a fiery denunciation of England’s new industrial landscape, where ‘the animation of her multitudes is sent like fuel to feed the factory smoke’, and where men’s creativity and intelligence is suffocated by repetitive machine work.

This contrast between medieval craftsmanship and Victorian industrialism brings Ruskin to a critique of the division of labour – the system of capitalist efficiency whereby complex tasks are broken down into discrete stages, with each worker being responsible for the repeated production of one bit, rather than the whole.

This form of organization had been praised by Adam Smith in the very first sentence of his 1776 treatise, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Later in the same work, Smith worried that unstimulating specialization may mean that the worker ‘has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention, in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur . . . and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become’.

Today, we recognize the argument against the division of labour as a key element of the Marxist critique of capitalism. Marx was writing privately of the alienating effect of machine-work upon the worker, ‘Just as he is thus depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine, and from being a man becomes an abstract activity and a belly.’

Both Ruskin and Marx employ the notion that the male worker who is reduced to repetitive machine-work ceases to be ‘a man’. But there are interesting differences in how the two thinkers make their similar argument.

For Ruskin, the primary crime of the industrial system is that it steals from the worker the opportunity to create a whole object and to put his own creative mark upon it.

Marx’s critique is motivated by similar concerns, but the master economist uses somewhat different language and emphases; Marx’s wage-slave worker is for Ruskin a creative spirit whose voice has been stolen. He writes: It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men: – Divided into mere segments of men – broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin, or the head of a nail.

But Ruskin says: All ideas of this kind are founded upon two mistaken suppositions: the first, that one man’s thoughts can be, or ought to be, executed by another man’s hands; the second, that manual labour is a degradation, when it is governed by intellect.

For Ruskin, the thought and the craft of making, the mental and the physical, were united in the same process: We are always in these days endeavoring to separate the two; we want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense.

Marx’s analysis is a critique of a kind of slavery, and Ruskin makes the same point, just as strongly, but it is embedded in a celebration of human creativity and craft, and the moral imperative that this should be freely expressed, individual, and unconstrained.

Nevertheless, even if Ruskin did not offer a simple manifesto for change, his great contribution was to establish individual autonomous creativity as a core value which society must nurture, not crush, if it is to retain any moral authority, or quality of life.

It was this emphasis on the power of individually crafted work which caught the attention of the young William Morris. It begins with an appreciation of the unconstrained joyfulness which Ruskin saw in the often bizarre, strange, and rough ornamentation which individual craftspeople had contributed to Gothic buildings – so this part of the argument could seem just to be an appreciation of individual talents.

But the argument shifts from the individual to the society – from the simple artist to the ‘big picture’ – by a logical route: individual self-expression is so vital that if a society creates supposedly rational systems (such as the capitalist division of labour) which do not allow a voice to people’s individual creativity, then the whole system rapidly becomes sick and degraded, like a tree in barren soil. Morris believed this passionately, and developed this emphasis on individual creative expression into a more expansive vision of happy, empowered creative communities.

But as he became a young man, medievalism took on a more developed meaning, in tandem with new research which was building knowledge about medieval life. Being able to evoke a clear picture of a way of living so very different to his current reality helped Morris to retain his genuine faith in the possibility of change.

• He clearly felt that a hands-on engagement with a craft was the only way to truly understand it.

Unlike Ruskin, though, Morris was a well-organized entrepreneur and avid multi-tasker, who didn’t waste any time in creating a successful business in response to this need.

Later in life, in 1891, Morris also founded the Kelmscott Press, which used the approach and printing techniques of 400 years earlier in order – as Morris explained to a journalist in 1895 – to give ‘a beautiful form’ to ‘the ideas we cherish’.

In an 1891 newspaper interview, Morris presented his vision of a socialist society where ‘We should have a library on every street corner, where everybody should read all the best books, printed in the best and most beautiful type. Instead he made exclusive handcrafted treasures.

A helpful explanation for this anomaly is offered by Tony Pinkney: From this standpoint, then, the Kelmscott Press books, however expensive and restricted in social circulation in their own day, are not evidences of medievalist nostalgia and political withdrawal, but are rather time-travelers from some far future we can barely imagine, showing how lovingly artifacts might be crafted in the socialist world that is to come.

Morris’s battle was fought on two fronts: first, to prompt a transformation of society, via grand and revolutionary plans, this necessarily having to happen at a point in the future; but second, to modify and disrupt things, in the here and now, by inserting finely produced material objects, and ethical working practices, into a society accustomed to ‘shoddy’ products and exploitative factories.

The expensive Kelmscott Press books are therefore consistent with Morris’s ‘all-or-nothing politics’ – he would rather show the world the true ideal book, rather than compromise with more affordable models of lower quality.

So rather than thinking that William Morris was a man who ran a craft business, and who also happened to be a writer of poetry and novels, and who also found time to produce political critiques and pamphlets, we instead come to the realization that William Morris was a man who projected a vision – a vision of great fundamental hope and optimism – through a striking number of different channels.

Along with the political non-fiction writings, they are all ‘visionary accounts of an ideal world’, as Wilmer puts it, reminding us of the possibility of alternatives: ‘To dream of the impossible and disregard reality is to question the inevitability of existing circumstances.’

• In this way, Morris offers his readers – and customers – a helping hand into the possibility of a new world.

The more common approach of Marxist writers tends to be a more hectoring tone of voice, in Theodor Adorno’s writings in the 1930s and 1940s, where the critic seems unable to believe that people would be so stupid as to apparently enjoy the appalling sentimental offerings of the popular culture industry.

On the one hand, it’s a well-meaning stance: Adorno passionately believes that people deserve better. But on the other hand, he just seems disgusted to observe that almost everybody is a moron.

William Morris takes a kinder approach to everyday life, recognizing that people have to ‘make do’ within a system which is not of their choosing. But instead of telling them how dumb their lives are, he offers stories, manifestos, songs, and objects from a better future, to feed the positive aspirations which he believes still reside in human hearts.

It is one of Morris’s undoubted strengths, that although he despises and sometimes despairs of modern society, he is unwilling to give up hope.

Morris was also well ahead of his time on the environment and sustainability. He observed that science had become a servant of the capitalist system, in terms of exploitation and profiteering, but was not being tasked to help alleviate the impact of industrial processes.

The notion that one arm of science and technology should be used to fix the environmental degradation caused by the other arm remains controversial, but Morris was 140 years ahead of the current debates.

The distinctive and special thing about today’s Web 2.0 world is that, at its best, it offers users a reasonably equal platform on which to share creative artifacts – such as videos, images and writings – which they have made themselves and which express their own emotions or ideas.

For Morris, the sharing of art in a community was one of the fundamentals, part of a society’s life-blood. In a lecture in 1877 he declared: I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.

• Making one’s mark in this way requires some effort, of course, but Morris assumes that this work brings its own rewards and so is fuelled from within.

Morris explains that creative work, which he more or less equates with any work worth doing, offers ‘hope’ – that key word again – in three ways. First there is ‘hope of rest’ – the pleasurable buzz of a job well done, as one comes to relax after the event. Second, ‘hope of product’ – the achievement of having made something worthwhile. And third, ‘hope of pleasure in the work itself ’ – a conscious pleasure in the activity, while it is being engaged in, and not ‘mere habit.

Morris acknowledges that this joyful celebration of work may seem ‘strange’ to many of his readers, as he knows that in current everyday reality they are trapped on the wrong side of the fence, doing ‘slave’s work – mere toiling to live, that we may live to toil’.

Later in the same lecture, Morris turns his attention to the ‘rich non-producing classes, But this is not wealth, the author asserts, it is ‘waste’.

This redefinition of the meaning of ‘wealth’ echoes Ruskin’s ‘There is no wealth but life’, of course, but Morris’s list is interesting – not least of all because, over 100 years before the rise of the World Wide Web, it highlights the collection and dissemination of knowledge, communication between people, and the ability to create and share expressive material, as the true route to pleasure and fulfillment.

Morris understood ‘genuine art’ to be ‘the expression of man’s pleasure in his handiwork’, and deplored the separation between the professional world of ‘art’ and the everyday things that people make.

The artist should be humble, engaged with the every day, and willing to make things themselves – to get their hands dirty, as it were. As Morris puts it: ‘The best artist was a workman still, the humblest workman was an artist.’

Today, the category of ‘artist’ is even more sharply removed from everyday creative practices, and often seems to be based on having the ‘right’ kind of art education, the necessary fashionable artworld connections, and pretentious way of talking about things.

You could go down the mainstream populist route, and hope to find TV stardom, or at least get anonymous but paid work doing graphics for movies; or you could hope to become the next darling of the artworld, ideally by memorizing some French poststructuralism and applying it to your ‘vision’ somehow; or nothing.

Today, the Web means that people don’t have to worry so much about labels – art/craft/ whatever – and have relatively unlimited channels for sharing stuff they have made. It is not guaranteed that anyone will pay attention, but at least work can be shown and shared, and the likelihood of it being noticed is much less dependent on a small number of elite gatekeepers.

The only healthy art, he said, is ‘an art which is to be made by the people and for the people, as a happiness to the maker and the user’.

So we do not have to choose between the individual or the collective: rather, a diverse community of individual voices offers a satisfying combined solution.

The meaning of making 2: Craft today

This chapter continues to follow the development of thinking about craft activity and making things. We will consider how those values can then spread out into a more general philosophy of everyday life. But then we’ll try to be rather more concrete again, and consider some of today’s popular craft practices, and the recent ‘rise’ of craft, and look at why people in the present day still like to make things themselves.

• Indeed, those practices may well be ancient – but the word ‘craft’ itself is relatively new.

In the eighteenth century, ‘craft’ referred primarily to political cunning and a sly, jocular, tricksy approach to social issues.1 By the time of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, ‘manual art; trade’ is listed as one of the meanings, along with ‘art; ability; dexterity’, alongside the earlier usage as ‘fraud; cunning; artifice’. During the nineteenth century, the notion of ‘craft’ or a ‘craftsman’ appeared even less often, remaining pretty dormant until the last quarter of that century, when it sprang into action. Although dissecting the etymology of specific words is not always the most valuable exercise, Paul Greenhalgh – a former Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum – uses the rather arbitrary gathering of ideas and orientations under the notion of craft to set out its different constituent dimensions. He writes: The ideological and intellectual underpinning of the craft constituency is not a consistent whole, but has several distinct threads to it. There are three. I will describe them as decorative art, the vernacular, and the politics of work. The first of these, decorative art, is a broad term which seems to encompass all the ‘applied’ forms of creativity which have in common the bruised, second-class feeling of being excluded from the category of ‘fine art’. The second element, the vernacular, refers to the authentic, natural voice of a community, unselfconsciously communicated through everyday things that people have made. In the third element, the politics of work, the actual crafted objects become secondary to the broader ideals about the conditions in which they are made.

• They have control over their own labour, and contribute to a vibrant and dynamic culture through the creation of their own individual things.

This loose grouping of idealistic thinkers and craftspeople built on the ideas of Ruskin and Morris in different ways, but central to the movement was the idea that all creative work was of equal status, and was the means by which human beings could connect with nature, with their own sense of self, and with other people.

Although rooted in Victorian Britain, it spread around the world, most notably in the USA, where it connected meaningfully with American notions of self-reliance, individualism, community, and romantic connection with nature.

It is something very much like this vision which inspires contemporary craft enthusiasts today, as well as exponents of Web 2.0 and online creativity.

As Greenhalgh goes on to say: Ultimately, for craft pioneers, the movement was centered on physical and mental freedom. By uniting the work process directly to the demand for a higher quality of life, they had regenerated the idea that craft was synonymous with power.

As we have seen, dehumanizing industrial methods were rejected because of a concern for the individual worker, but the Arts and Crafts alternative led to beautiful handmade products that the typical worker could not afford. This terrible paradox is immediately dissolved in the simple phrase: ‘do it yourself ’.

This solution to the conundrum was helped along by Gustav Stickley, a furniture maker, craftsman, and architect, based in New York.

Stickley’s belief in ‘a simple, democratic art’ that would provide Americans with ‘material surroundings conducive to plain living and high thinking’ was such that he included his designs and working plans for furniture, metalwork, and needlework in the magazine. In this sense, Stickley invented, or rather revived, the concept of ‘open source’ – the system by which software developers today share unprotected code in the belief that others should be freely able to use it and improve it.

This democratic approach is highly consistent with the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement: craft skills were valued for their own careful, individual, handmade beauty, not because they were supposed to be the skills of an expert elite.

William Morris made things to a very high standard, because that gave him pleasure, and because he thought the care and quality of their production would bring pleasure to others too. But he didn’t make things to a very high standard because he thought that it made him better than everybody else. ‘Do it yourself ’ is, therefore, part of the original Arts and Crafts message – but processed through American optimism, and communicated in a cheerful and unpretentious way.

Today, the mainstream notion of ‘DIY’ is associated with everyday home improvement – putting up shelves, assembling fl at-pack wardrobes, and fixing drainpipes oneself, without professional help. This is a commonplace, suburban kind of phenomenon, popularly seen as a bit boring, and nothing to do with any kind of radical political movement.

When this kind of DIY emerged in the 1960s, though, it was – at least for some – associated with the alternative counterculture. In particular, it was argued that the formal education system had filled students’ heads with abstract information, supposedly of some background value for those who might enter the professions, but lacking real-world usefulness.

The philosopher Alan Watts put it like this: Our educational system, in its entirety, does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don’t learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life. The whole education that we get for our children in school is entirely in terms of abstractions. It trains you to be an insurance salesman or a bureaucrat, or some kind of cerebral character.

This was said during a 1967 symposium, of sorts, which took place on Watts’s houseboat moored in Sausalito, California, in which his interlocutors included the LSD enthusiast Timothy Leary, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, and the poet and environmentalist Gary Snyder.

This critical attitude to schooling, allied with the notion that people can do things better themselves without such institutions, was reflected in the work of John Holt, whose books How Children Fail and How Children Learn raised public awareness of these new ideas in the 1960s.

Holt argued that learning was something that humans do naturally from the earliest age, and that any machinery designed to make ‘learning’ happen as a specific kind of activity, separate from the normal experience of everyday life – as schools intend to do – could only get in the way.

Responding to critics’ fears that children would not bother to learn anything if left to their own devices, Holt argued that children should be trusted to build their own understandings, and could make their own meaningful connections with knowledge, which would be much more useful and effective for them than the abstract pile of procedures and information that children are told that they will need by schools.

Another key figure in this everyday-life DIY movement was Stewart Brand, who in 1968 launched his homemade publication, The Whole Earth Catalog, which was highly successful and influential, and had several further editions up to 1985.

The phrase ‘whole Earth’, which appears in the title of many of Brand’s projects, refers to a thought that he had in 1966, that when NASA released a photograph showing the whole of the planet from space, it would lead to a change of consciousness as people realized their place in a global system of limited resources. One week later, he was thrown off the University of California Berkeley campus for wearing a day-glo sandwich board and selling 25-cent badges which read: ‘Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?’

The well-illustrated Whole Earth Catalog, published two years after that, was eclectic in the extreme, but the things and ideas that it featured shared a common spirit. As it said in its statement of purpose at the front: We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory – as via government, big business, formal education, church – has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.

Across all of Brand’s work – with the possible exception of his recent (reluctant) enthusiasm for nuclear power and geoengineering – we see the values of self-reliance, do it yourself, and community. And, to be fair, humanity wouldn’t be needing the nuclear power and geoengineering if it had stuck to the caring, convivial, small-scale ecological values which Brand has always supported.

A similar but different version of the DIY ethos is the ‘lo fi ’ music and zine culture, influenced in part by the punk scene. This ethos is discussed, for example, in Amy Spencer’s book DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture. She’s an enthusiastic guide.

On the first page she says: In the face of the bland consumerist pop that dominates the airwaves and the bestselling celebrity biographies that fill the bookshops it is exciting to realize that there are an increasing amount of independent and creative minds who care enough to go against the grain and produce music, art, magazines and literature that is truly unique – whether it is likely to sell or not.

Spencer does not believe that online culture is destined to replace these independently made objects, because of the excitement associated with creating alternative cultural items that you can hold in your own hands.

Spencer says: The internet has enabled DIY culture to become more accessible and less elitist, but, remarkably, it hasn’t diminished the enduring appeal of the homemade zine or the 4-track demo.

On the other hand, producing boxes full of new physical objects is often bad for the environment, and getting rid of those objects, even to people who want them, is hard work.

Amy Spencer notes that zines are more like gifts than commercial products, since they are done for love not money, and argues that unlike mainstream media, the mode of their production is inspiring for readers – showing that you don’t have to accept the given culture, and can create your own instead.

She highlights the role of ‘riot grrrl’ zines as central to establishing the principles of ‘third wave’ feminism, which rejected the victim stance and instead went on the front foot. Rather than just complaining about offensive popular culture, they created its replacement: Here women redefined feminism for the 90s and recognized each other as manufacturers of culture, as opposed to participants in a culture that they were encouraged to accept. They were encouraged to reclaim the media and produce their own cultural forms.

The alternative zine movement also led to ‘mama zines’, offering an alternative to young parents who did not wish to swallow the commercialized vision of parenthood.

Betsy Greer, who coined the term ‘craftivism’ - makes the point that today it is easy to buy stuff – clothing, music, reading-matter, children’s toys, food, or whatever: cheap or expensive versions of any of these things are readily available. But, she argues, there is a resistance, a political choice, in not buying those things and choosing to make your own instead.

It is in this way that traditional crafts such as knitting, cooking, weaving, sewing, and gardening have come to take on a gentle revolutionary dimension.

We’ve got used to experts, professionals, and businesses telling us that the way to do things – whether building a wall, or learning about a subject, or getting entertainment – is to pay other people, who know what they’re doing, to do the task for us, because we couldn’t really manage it ourselves.

DIY culture says that’s rubbish: you can do it yourself, and you can do it with more creativity, character, and relevance than if you got a generic or ‘expert’ solution. And, importantly, it feels good to do it yourself: it’s really good for self-esteem – a crucial dimension of personal psychology – whereas getting it done for you is disempowering, and often frustrating, and less meaningful. Of course, our time and our skills are usually far from unlimited, so it is often convenient to get experienced people to help us – that’s fine, of course, and it keeps the economy going, as people can sell their time and expertise to others.

The DIY ethos, and a passion for craft, are not just about isolated projects, but spill over into everyday life more generally. Suggesting that people can make, fix, and repair things for themselves has much in common with sustainability and environmentalism. This doesn’t mean that the crafty person rejects all ‘stuff ’ – on the contrary, having interesting things in our lives, things that we enjoy and which we look after, is enriching.

John Naish argues in his book Enough, is that we keep on wanting to acquire things rather than finding pleasure in the ones we’ve got. When the basic human brain evolved, gathering stuff continuously was good for survival. Naish quotes Robert Trivers, an evolutionary biologist, who says: ‘We’ve evolved to be maximizing machines. There isn’t necessarily a stop mechanism in us that says, “Relax, you’ve got enough”.’

So although most people now have some awareness of environmental issues, and may even suspect that having more and more things isn’t going to make us happier, we don’t tend to think ‘I’ve got enough now’. Instead, we continue to acquire new stuff, rather than making or reusing things, if only for the temporary frisson of opening a glossy new item, or the novelty of an unfamiliar gadget.

Since making and sharing things can make a positive contribution to well-being and a sense of connectedness – as argued throughout this book – then there is much to be gained from shopping less, and creating and recycling more. The human brain doesn’t always think like that, however, so we need to make a conscious effort to reprogram ourselves.

The corresponding argument in the field of media and entertainment is that we can gain pleasure, and a sense of connectedness, from the homemade stories, films, animations, and reports made by everyday amateur people, on a domestic level, and shared online.

There is a strong argument for having well-resourced and independent news and current affairs programmes, and quality drama and entertainment on film, television, and online. But in a healthy society there should be just as much cheerfully unfinanced non-professional material made by all kinds of people, just because they want to, or have something to say, all around the world.

Meanwhile, the notion of craft has been extended into spheres of life which are not really to do with making things – or making media – at all.

The hands-on engagement of crafting and making, then, connects us with broader values, but the crafting orientation becomes one which can be a continuous part of everyday life, regardless of whether or not we happen to have a hands-on craft project. Rather, the gentle crafting spirit comes, ideally, to occupy all interactions with people and with nature: There is nothing more personal, political, or relevant than attending to the . . . character of our own attitude as we engage in crafting our experience and our relationships.

The understanding that we make our own experiences, as well as shaping our material surroundings, is an important one to emerge from craft activity.

In Carl Honoré’s excellent 2004 book, In Praise of Slow, which introduced the slow movement to a general audience, the author shows how the modern impetus to cram as much stuff as possible into our days has a negative effect on our well-being, and also means that we gain less pleasure, and knowledge, from the things that we do. He argues that a ‘slower’ approach to work, leisure, education, child development, and other areas of life can dramatically increase the quality of the experiences, even if they are fewer in number. So in some ways it is about working harder, and doing things better, by making decisions to reduce the rush.

The link with craft and making is that when one is not just a consumer, guzzling thing after thing, but also a producer, going through the necessarily slower and more thoughtful process of making something, one becomes more aware of the details and decisions which underpin everyday things and experiences, and therefore more able to gain pleasure and inspiration from the appreciation of things.

Human beings have obviously made things for their own use for thousands of years. The broad recent history seems to be that during World War II, in the USA, the UK, and elsewhere, the make it yourself and ‘make do and mend’ ethos was especially strong, encouraged by governments and embraced by the people, as a domestic tactic showing the kind of initiative that might help to win the war.

But since the start of the present century – and obviously these are rough and blurred movements, not clear-cut phases – enthusiasm and respect for homemade things have risen again.

People are increasingly aware that the manufacturing of endless stuff is not simply a proud sign of humanity’s superior powers, but rather has troubling implications – and also because of the rise of the Web as a frequently homemade phenomenon, which can, additionally, connect and support crafters around the world.

Although heavily connected with traditions of craft and making which go back decades, and indeed centuries, this resurgence of activity is often explained – and, to be fair, genuinely experienced – as a ‘new’ phenomenon.

This exhilaration at being part of an apparently new craft movement may also have been felt by some individuals 10,20, or 100 years earlier, but no matter. Handmade Nation certainly does seem to document a newly empowered and organized movement – helped, as I’ve said, by the new visibility of their activities via the internet, which enables the excited enthusiasts in one corner of the world to inspire and encourage similarly energized individuals elsewhere, with a depth and speed that was not previously possible.

Special mention must go here to Etsy, a vast and lovely platform where people can buy and sell, but also admire and be inspired by, a massive array of crafted things from around the world. Ravelry, the superb social network for knitters, has also been very influential.

For these crafters, the internet is not the new place where craft itself happens – that’s what we will be discussing in the next chapter – but is the new vehicle for communicating about (real-world) craft, for showing projects and connecting with others.

It means that they have been able to collectively develop a firm and positive sense of shared meaning, and mission, which was probably more difficult to establish when craft activity was more fragmented and isolated.

One such expression of the personal and political meanings of this recent movement are expressed, for instance, in the ‘Craftifesto’, written by Amy Carlton and Cinnamon Cooper, founders of the DIY Trunk Show, an annual craft event in Chicago: Craftifesto: The Power is in Your Hands! We believe: Craft is powerful. We want to show the depth and breadth of the crafting world. Anything you want you can probably get from a person in your own community. Craft is personal. To know that something was made by hand, by someone who cares that you like it, makes that object much more enjoyable. Craft is political. We’re trying to change the world. We want everyone to rethink corporate culture and consumerism. Craft is possible. Everybody can create something!

These statements show how craft has become more than just individuals making nice things: there is now a sense of community and shared purpose.

So what explains the activity, and the rise, of crafting? Part of the explanation appears above, in that crafting is now a community and a movement with appealing values, that people want to be a part of.

Sabrina Gschwandtner, a knitter who has published both a series of journals and a book called KnitKnit, says that she is frequently asked ‘Why is handcraft so popular right now?’ She suggests that it is ‘a reaction against a whole slew of things, including our hyper fast culture, increasing reliance on digital technology, [and] the proliferation of consumer culture’. She notes that sustainability is often a motivating factor.

This is an argument that can apply to a range of crafts: the same point is made by Matthew Crawford to explain why fixing a motorbike is so satisfying, compared with office work, in his book The Case for Working With Your Hands.

Deb Dormody, who makes and binds her own books, says that homemade things are special because they carry the ‘authentic and personal’ touch of the person who has made them.

Christy Petterson, who makes earrings, postcards, and other things, tells of how she always liked being creative but had been put off doing ‘art’ because the education system had framed it as ‘serious’ and ‘analytical’.

These motivations, then, all tend to combine personal satisfactions with the pleasure and inspiration of being part of a craft community.

In line with this reasoning, a number of books and websites about craft today emphasize the essentially intimate and personal nature of the experience of making. Here, making is still connecting – with materials, other people, and the world – but in gentle and quiet ways, with no need for grand celebratory announcements.

Actively seeking out opportunities to be creative together is presented here as one of the most important things that families can do. Soule argues that this is good for the wellbeing of parents, who can continue to explore their own interests and maintain a distinct identity, and for bonding the family together, as well as for the creative development of children.

In The Subversive Stitch, Rozsika Parker writes about embroidery as a craft practice which is two contrasting things at once: on the one hand, it is, and has been, a marker of femininity, but on the other hand, it is, and has been, a ‘weapon of resistance’ to the constraints associated with the idea of femininity, enabling women to actively produce things in the world – transforming materials into meaningful objects – and to carve out a place for personal thought and self-expression.

The process of knitting is rewarding because something both pleasing and useful is produced, and for some because it represents an ethical and political choice – to make some clothing oneself rather than purchase it from the clothing industry, with its often very badly paid workers.

These pleasures and connections are not limited to knitting and sewing. The motivations of guerrilla gardeners, to take one more example, can be surprisingly similar.

These non-confrontational activists take pleasure in the secret and anonymous process of their work; their ongoing efforts to make the world a nicer place through small but beautiful interventions; and their sense of connection with the illicit planting community in particular, gardeners and environmental activists in general, and with nature itself.